Battle of Changsha (1944)
The Battle of Changsha of 1944 ended with a ceremony that defied every military convention of East Asia. On the 14th of December 1944, Chiang Kai-shek personally received General Fang Xianjue at his Chongqing residence. Fang had surrendered the city of Hengyang to Japanese forces that August. He was decorated with the Order of Blue Sky and White Sun. The campaign that produced that reception had been launched with the ambition to secure Japan's position across southern China. It also intended to silence the American warplanes that had been striking Japanese forces across the region. What Japan actually gained from all of it is a more complicated answer. The distance between those ambitions and that result begins with a railway map and a question of who controlled the skies.
Japan called the broader offensive "Tairiku Datsu Sakusen," which translates as "Operation to Break through the Continent." The aim was a connected land and rail corridor linking Japanese-controlled territory in Manchuria and Korea through Central China and down into Southeast Asia. Seizing that corridor required capturing specific cities that sat at railway junctions no other route could bypass.
Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, controlled the junction of two critical railroad lines. One was the Hunan-Guizhou-Guangxi railroad; the other ran from Canton to Wuhan. Hengyang sat on the same tri-province railroad and lay close to the Canton-Wuhan line. Lake Dongting and the cities of Changsha, Hengyang, and Lingling were also connected by the Xiang River. Together, these positions formed an interlocking geographic system. Controlling any one without the others left Japan's position incomplete.
The Japanese 11th Army, stationed at Wuhan, received orders to attack Changsha first and advance southwest along the tri-province railroad. It would later join forces with the Japanese 23rd Army pushing north from Canton. Shunroku Hata, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese China Expeditionary Army, decided to remain at Wuhan from the 25th of May 1944 to oversee both phases personally.
General Isamu Yokoyama led the 11th Army's drive south. He commanded five divisions, reinforced by four additional divisions and three independent brigades. The force reflected the scale of Operation Ichi-Go's ambitions. But the immediate cause for moving it into Hunan was not the railroad itself. It was five air bases and the American pilots flying out of them.
Brigadier General Claire Lee Chennault commanded the American Flying Tigers from five air bases along the tri-province railroad. Those bases were at Hengyang, Lingling, Guilin, Liuzhou, and Nanning. From those positions, his fighters and bombers struck Japanese forces across China and the island of Formosa. The bases also placed American aircraft within range of the Japanese home islands themselves.
The Imperial Japanese Army Air Service launched several strikes against those installations, but none succeeded. Facing that failure, Japan's military leadership concluded that ground forces would have to take the bases by direct assault. That decision pulled the 11th Army south from Wuhan and made Hengyang, home to one of Chennault's most important installations, the campaign's central objective.
Fang Xianjue's understrength Tenth Corps was the primary Chinese force defending Hengyang when the Japanese arrived. What it accomplished with that disadvantage would define the entire campaign.
China's Tenth Corps repelled two separate Japanese advances on Hengyang before the decisive assault of August 1944. Fang Xianjue's defenders had constructed barricades up to four meters high and positioned troops to create overlapping crossfire zones. Those zones exacted a heavy toll. The Japanese 68th and 116th Divisions lost morale and began preparing to withdraw.
The Japanese 58th Division broke into the northwest perimeter of the city, which was held by China's Third Division. That breach changed the calculus, and the assault resumed. In August 1944, three Japanese two-star generals coordinated a renewed push with air support. Five Chinese corps, the 37th, 62nd, 74th, 79th, and 100th, attempted repeated relief runs to Hengyang. Four Japanese divisions, the 27th, 34th, 40th, and 64th, blocked every attempt.
By the 8th of August 1944, after forty-seven days of fighting, Fang's force had been reduced from seventeen thousand soldiers to three thousand. That count included the wounded. With no relief force breaking through and his command decimated, Fang surrendered the city. The Japanese took Hengyang and its commander together.
The predicament at Hengyang had already shaken Tokyo before the city fell. Combined with the loss of Saipan on the 9th of July 1944, the siege helped hasten the collapse of Hideki Tojo's cabinet. Tojo and his government resigned on the 18th of July 1944, three weeks before the siege ended.
Three thousand prisoners passed into Japanese custody when Hengyang fell. How many survived that captivity, and how the generals among them found their way out, is where the story goes next.
A clandestine team from the Changsha Station of the Military-Statistics Bureau rescued Fang Xianjue on the 19th of September 1944. Most of the senior Chinese generals who had been captured at Hengyang managed to escape separately, slipping through Japanese lines in independent attempts. Some survivors from the Tenth Corps also slipped through Japanese lines, making their way to Yi-San in Guangxi on foot. The Military Affairs Commission had reactivated the Tenth Corps headquarters there. Li Yu-tang was the commanding general of the parent unit above the Tenth Corps.
Among the three thousand Chinese prisoners Japan held after Hengyang's fall, one thousand died of starvation, injury, sickness, or mistreatment. The campaign's toll did not end when the guns went quiet.
The six generals who had surrendered Hengyang were welcomed in Chongqing rather than punished. They were described there as "Fang and his five tiger-like generals." Fang was appointed two-star deputy commander of the 37th Army Group. He and two of the other generals were each given full command of new full-strength divisions. All six remained on active military duty past the end of the war.
The Japanese 68th and 116th Divisions had lost their combat strength and been reassigned to garrison duties. The cost Japan paid for Hengyang extended well beyond those two divisions.
Three hundred and ninety Japanese commissioned officers died at Hengyang, and another five hundred and twenty were wounded. A field hospital of the Japanese 68th Division received roughly four thousand wounded and sick soldiers during the battle. Ninety percent of those men died in that hospital. The Japanese 11th Army required one hundred thousand additional soldiers to compensate for the campaign's combined losses.
Xue Yue's Ninth Military Front lost two corps loyal to Chiang Kai-shek: the 4th and the 10th. This cost left "Tiger Xue" a toothless tiger until the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Chinese forces to the north of Hengyang, meanwhile, used the period to expand their own influence in the surrounding region.
The 11th Army seized Lingling on the 4th of September 1944 and took control of Guilin on the 10th of November 1944. On paper, Operation Ichi-Go's land corridor was complete. In practice, Japan lacked the manpower to maintain actual control over what it had taken.
In July 1944, while Hengyang was still under siege, the United States moved all its bomber groups to Saipan. American forces had just captured that island, and from it, bombers could reach the Japanese home islands directly. The tactical objective that had justified Operation Ichi-Go was bypassed by a single American move in the Pacific.
Tokyo rejected plans to seize more Chinese territory and agreed to set aside the "Tang Ju" treaty. Wang Jingwei's puppet government, which Japan had expected to provide administrative cover, proved useless. The Chinese government continued pressing Japan to withdraw completely from the northeast.
In April 1945, Japan sent troops into western Hunan, targeting the settlement of Zhijiang. The aim was to open a path toward Sichuan. Chinese National Guard forces intercepted the column and nearly wiped it out in an ambush. Japan surrendered at the Zijiang River. China regained some of its territory. By that point, the course of the war had turned.
Common questions
What was the Battle of Changsha in 1944 and why was it fought?
The Battle of Changsha of 1944, also known as the Battle of Hengyang or the Campaign of Changsha-Hengyang, was a Japanese invasion of Hunan province near the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It encompassed three separate engagements: one invasion of Changsha and two assaults on Hengyang. Japan launched it as part of Operation Ichi-Go to establish a land and rail corridor across China and neutralize American air bases operated by the Flying Tigers.
What were Japan's goals in Operation Ichi-Go during the Battle of Changsha?
Operation Ichi-Go, known in Japanese as "Tairiku Datsu Sakusen" or "Operation to Break through the Continent," aimed to create a continuous land and rail corridor from Manchuria and Korea through Central China to Southeast Asia. The tactical goal was also to seize the Hunan-Guizhou-Guangxi railroad and neutralize American air bases at Hengyang, Lingling, Guilin, Liuzhou, and Nanning. Shunroku Hata, Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese China Expeditionary Army, oversaw the operation from Wuhan from the 25th of May 1944.
Who was Fang Xianjue and why was he honored after surrendering Hengyang?
Fang Xianjue commanded China's Tenth Corps during the forty-seven-day siege of Hengyang, which fell on the 8th of August 1944 when his force was reduced from seventeen thousand to three thousand men. Rather than face court-martial, Fang was received by Chiang Kai-shek at Chongqing on the 14th of December 1944, awarded the Order of Blue Sky and White Sun, and given command of a new full-strength division. He was also appointed two-star deputy commander of the 37th Army Group, and all six generals who had surrendered Hengyang remained on active military duty past the war's end.
How many casualties did Japan suffer at the Battle of Hengyang in 1944?
Three hundred and ninety Japanese commissioned officers died at Hengyang, with another five hundred and twenty wounded. A field hospital of the Japanese 68th Division received about four thousand wounded and sick soldiers, of whom ninety percent died. The Japanese 11th Army subsequently required one hundred thousand additional soldiers to replace its losses from the Changsha-Hengyang campaign.
What role did Claire Chennault and the Flying Tigers play in the Battle of Changsha?
Brigadier General Claire Lee Chennault's Flying Tigers, part of the United States 14th Air Force, operated from air bases at Hengyang, Lingling, Guilin, Liuzhou, and Nanning, striking Japanese forces across China and Formosa and positioning American aircraft within range of the Japanese home islands. Japan's air strikes against those bases failed, so Japan deployed ground forces to capture them directly. This tactical decision was the primary reason Japan launched its ground campaign into Hunan province.
Why did Japan's victory in the Battle of Changsha fail to achieve its strategic goals?
In July 1944, while the siege of Hengyang was still under way, the United States transferred all its bomber groups from the Chinese air bases to the newly captured island of Saipan, from which American bombers could reach the Japanese home islands directly without the Chinese installations. Japan secured the corridor and air bases it had fought for but lacked the manpower to hold them. The Japanese 11th Army needed one hundred thousand additional soldiers just to compensate for the campaign's losses, and the 68th and 116th Divisions were reassigned from frontline combat to garrison duties.
All sources
8 references cited across the entry
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- 2Book抗日战争湖南战场史料(四)Hunan Province Archives; Second Historical Archives of China — 2012
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- 5Book一号作戦広西の会戦War History Office of the National Defence College of Japan — Asagumo Shimbunsha — 1966
- 6BookAtlas of World War IIRichard Natkiel — Brompton Books Corp — 1985
- 7Book正健 馬軍事科學出版社 — 2005